Follow the adventures of this Canadian in Edinburgh as he attempted to visit 365 different pubs in 365 days.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

#116. Brew Dog, 143 Cowgate, Edinburgh

The first thing you see upon entering this brewery of "beer for punks" is the following list of omissions:

No Football.
No Shots.
No Stella.

How can you not love these guys? I suspect these Nos are a warning shot across the bow of any unsuspecting Lager Boys and their accompanying Labia Brigade that may inadvertently stumble over from next door.

Brew Dog have made quite a name for themselves through an innovative branding strategy that includes selling extremely strong beer. To fund their growth, they undertook a private round of equity financing by selling shares in the company online to their customers, rewarding subscribers with a lifetime discount on their product. Pure marketing genius that I expect to see copied by the likes of Phillips back home.

As for the beer, the pub offers a huge choice of craft-brewed ales. I asked for the strongest, and for £3.50 I was served a dixie-cup sized portion of the Paradox Imperial Stout, 15% abv, as pictured.

If this is beer for punks, it occurs to me that my book is "programming for punks." I was never a fan of punk as a facile outlet for anarchy, violence-as-fashion, and gobbing on television, but there is something about the intellectual left-wing angst of bands like Gang of Four that led me to embrace the punk aesthetic.

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Computer scientist, educator, entrepreneur, father, author of Lord of the Files, and frustrated musician, Russell Ovans is the President of the Barkerville Brewing Co. Dr. Ovans earned a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and has taught software engineering at the University of Victoria. He was the founding CEO of Backstage, a company that pioneered the monetization of social games on Facebook through the sale of virtual currency. After selling Backstage to RealNetworks in 2010, he retired to Scotland where he kept busy visiting 365 different pubs in 365 days. Upon his return to Canada he was an Executive-in-Residence at VIATeC.